Publicis' Drugstore launches its first program 'Meet The Makers' in India

(Left) Anil K Nair and Ajay Ramasubramaniam at the event.Publicis Groupe’s initiative – Drugstore has launched its India operations with its first program ‘Meet The Makers’ that targeted the real estate sector.

The experiential event was designed and created in partnership with Zone Startups, an organisation that incubates and accelerates start-ups in the Indian ecosystem. The event was held at their operations space at the iconic Bombay Stock Exchange Building at Dalal Street.

Nair, the ‘entrepreneur-in-residence’ for Publicis Drugstore believes that the biggest business disruptor and saviour going into this decade will be an attitude of inside out innovation within large traditional organisations that will need to be encouraged &amd cultivated.

He added, “It’s a win-win for both. And we at Publicis Groupe are determined to make these dialogues happen for the overall good of the market place and the consumer at large”. Speaking at the event, he added: “The start-up space has been responsible for some of the biggest market disruptions across the world. Be it Uber or Air Bnb, they have all gone to redefine the space they were conceived in. We could have gone the traditional way and approached the fin-tech or other sectors which have such interfaces all the time. We however, have focused on real estate as it is one industry that needs the kind of innovations that start ups bring with them.”

Some of the notable startup pitches that came up were Phynart, a home automation start-up that incorporates Artificial Intelligence and data mining in traditional automation systems and Enso Immersive, an R & D establishment driving research in technologies like Augmented Virtual Reality for developing applications and platforms across industries like real estate. The real estate industry was represented by leading players like Omkar, Tata Housing, Kalpataru, Godrej properties and Puranik.

Ramasubramaniam said, “The start-up scene is well ahead in terms of infrastructure, support and finance. It is only recently that the Indian scenario has started catching up. There is still some time when crowdsourcing and crowd-funding will become the norm for our nation, until then we are focused on creating the right kind of environment with the assistance of the Publicis Groupe to incubate, accelerate and facilitate the transition of the start-ups to their relevant industrial sector.”

For the record, Publicis Drugstore incubates innovation ideas and projects on behalf of the Publicis Groupe clients around the world in collaboration with the startup sector.These innovation incubation programs range from supper chats with CXOs, to hackathons and long format innovation projects.